Site Mobile Navigation

A German Pope Confronts the Nazi Past at Auschwitz

Pope Benedict XVI, once a German soldier, visited Auschwitz, walking through the infamous gate promising Work Shall Set You Free.Credit
Pawel Kopczynski/Reuters

AUSCHWITZ, Poland, May 28 — Pope Benedict XVI prayed on Sunday at the cells and crematories of the concentration camp complex here, on a visit he called "particularly difficult and troubling for a Christian, for a pope from Germany."

"Words fail," said Benedict, born Joseph Ratzinger in Bavaria in 1927. The son of a policeman, he was inducted unwillingly into the Hitler Youth and the German Army. "In the end, there can only be a dread silence, a silence that itself is a heartfelt cry to God.

"Why, Lord, did you remain silent?" he said, his voice wobbling. "How could you tolerate this?"

Benedict has marveled that a German could have been elected to lead the world's Catholics only 60 years after the horrors at Auschwitz. His visit thus marked one more milestone of reckoning over the more than one million people who died here, most of them Jews, as well as a significant stop in his year-old papacy.

The images, beamed around the world, were striking: the pope in pristine white walking alone under the infamous lie forged in iron promising freedom through work; two kisses on the cheeks of a Jewish survivor; dark rain that gave way to sun and then, somehow, a rainbow as he finished prayers.

But, in his two hours here, on the final day of his four-day trip to Poland, Benedict confronted the gnarl of the past in a distinctly theological, rather than emotional or personal, way — a trait that is emerging as the hallmark of his papacy.

Unlike his predecessor, John Paul II, who visited here in 1979, he said little about himself, and nothing about his experience in the war. Benedict was part of an antiaircraft unit at an airplane motor factory, deserted and was held as an American prisoner of war — all without firing his gun.

While he spoke eloquently about "forgiveness and reconciliation," he did not beg pardon for the sins of Germans or of the Roman Catholic church during World War II. He laid the blame squarely on the Nazi regime, avoiding the painful but now common acknowledgment among many Germans that ordinary citizens also shared responsibility.

He said he came here "as a son of the German people, a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honor, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation."

He then cast the war into a larger theological frame: that the Nazis' attempt to eradicate the Jews was an attempt by man to banish, and replace, God. He said that God set limits on man's power, and thus, the war showed the nightmare of a world without God.

"Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke in Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are entirely valid," he said.

"If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone, to those men who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world.

"By destroying Israel, they ultimately wanted to tear up the tap root of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful."

It is uncertain whether the pope's lack of emphasis on the role of ordinary Germans will anger Jewish groups. Benedict, though, is well known to top Jewish leaders, who have met with him for decades in an effort to improve once bitter relations between Jews and Roman Catholics.

Photo

Pope Benedict XVI bowing in front of the death wall at the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz in Oswiecim near Krakow, Poland, on Sunday.Credit
Jens Meyer/Associated Press

Rabbi David Rosen, a top official with the American Jewish Committee who has known Benedict for nearly two decades, called his omission of a broader, national responsibility "lamentable" but nothing new in the pope's often expressed interpretation of the war.

"Will it make any difference to Jewish-Catholic relations?" Rabbi Rosen said in a telephone interview from Israel. "No, because Jewish-Catholic relations anyway are no longer based upon our view of the past but on the nature of relations in the present, and from that perspective Benedict XVI is as good as it gets."

Benedict's visit to Poland was his second trip outside of Italy since John Paul died in April 2005 and Benedict was elected to replace him.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

On a tour of places important to John Paul, Benedict, though less charismatic and not Polish, still drew huge and enthusiastic crowds, culminating with what the police estimated as just under one million worshipers at an outdoor mass in Krakow.

More directly than he had done elsewhere on this trip, Benedict urged Poles in his homily not to dilute their faith, on display in the crowds here in the last four days, as many in other more secular European nations have.

"I ask you, finally, to share with the other peoples of Europe and the world the treasure of your faith," he said.

But the visit to the Nazi concentration camp was the heart of the trip, a destination that Joaquín Navarro-Valls, the Vatican spokesman, said earlier this weekend Benedict had specifically asked for. As Cardinal Ratzinger, he had come here twice before, in 1979 with John Paul and the next year with a group of German bishops.

He began his trip with a long walk several paces ahead of his entourage, under the sign in German that translates as "Work Shall Set You Free." He then walked over the gravel pathway, past the old brick barracks, to the wall where prisoners were executed. He prayed alone in front of it, bowing at the end.

Next to the wall, he met with 32 survivors of the camp, all but one Polish Catholics. He gave a double kiss to the only Jew in the group, Henryk Mandelbaum. Another survivor, Jerzy Bielecki, told the pope how he escaped from Auschwitz in 1944 by slowly collecting parts of an SS uniform, then sewing them together. He said he left with a Jewish woman, whose life was saved.

After visiting the cell of a Catholic priest killed there and a center for dialogue, Benedict led an interfaith service, stopping first in the rain under his white papal umbrella to read stones etched with inscriptions in the languages of prisoners there.

"The place where we are standing is a place of memory," he said. "At the same time, it is the place of the Shoah," the Hebrew term for the Holocaust.

Twice he asked where God could have been in the face of such destruction. But he could not answer the question.

"We cannot peer into God's mysterious plan, " he said. "We see it only piecemeal, and we would be wrong to set ourselves up as judges of God and history. When all is said and done, we must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God: Rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature!"

In deference to still-raw Polish memories of Germans, Benedict had spoken on this trip in Italian, or, in shorter prayers and greetings, Polish. Only at Birkenau, a death camp that is part of the Auschwitz complex, did he speak in his native German, in a prayer.

"Lord, you are the God of peace," he said. "You are peace. A heart seeking conflict cannot understand you."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A7 of the National edition with the headline: A German Pope Confronts The Nazi Past at Auschwitz. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe